I See Nietzsche Fall Like Lightning

On the dissident right.

James Taylor Foreman
9 min readSep 12, 2024

I’m going to take an ill-advised stab at assessing the world’s most pretended-to-be-understood philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.

To me, Nietzsche was a brilliant writer, a lucid critic of some of the more anemic versions of Christianity, but also clearly wrong.

Still, there’s a whole group of people online — as far-flung as they come — who aspire to the mad philosopher’s ideals.

They want a return to some kind of Greek or Roman “aesthetic vitalism.” You can get the vibe from their profile photos of ancient Greek “chads” or the images of high art. They want to help you become the Übermensch.

In our WALL-E world of docile phone addicts, you can at least understand what they’re yearning for. But, somebody asked a question about this that struck me as pretty funny: “What does a day in the life of a vitalist even look like?”

I think we can answer that technically.

If you really want to adopt Nietzsche’s values, first consider: the entirety of human history before Christianity. “Vital” paganism is covert stories of endless human sacrifice, or “scapegoating.”

Modern people don’t really have a good understanding of why human sacrifice happened. A little background (I’ve been…

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James Taylor Foreman
James Taylor Foreman

Written by James Taylor Foreman

Reality is narrative and our only job is to make it beautiful. Subscribe to move me directly to your inbox --> https://www.taylorforeman.com/